English poetry

For him the bell tolled

THE thrill of discovering John Donne's deliriously inventive “Songs and Sonets” is one of the great perks of turning up to English lessons at school. Those who wish to learn more about the life of the Renaissance poet have several biographies to choose from, including this new one by John Stubbs. Donne wrote “No man is an Island”, and Mr Stubbs carefully explains that we can understand him “not by treating him as an island, but by seeing his place on the volatile island he inhabited”.

He was born in London in 1572. His father was a successful ironmonger. His mother was much grander, a descendant of the martyred Sir Thomas More, and he was raised a Roman Catholic at a time of fervent post-Reformation Protestantism. He went up to Oxford aged 12, which was not unusual at the time, especially for Catholic children. Later, as a law student at the Inns of Court, he earned a reputation as a poet, wit and ladies' man.

Donne may, as Mr Stubbs believes, have joined two naval expeditions, to Cadiz and the Azores. In 1598 he became secretary to the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, Sir Thomas Egerton. But his promising career at court hit the buffers when he secretly married his boss's niece, Ann. “John Donne, Ann Donne, undone” he is said to have written on the back of a door on their wedding day. And so they were.

His father-in-law failed to get the marriage declared illegal but found other ways to make the couple's life miserable. For nearly a decade Donne struggled to support his wife and their many children. The chapters dealing with these unhappy years are the most impressive in the book.

Donne was 43 when he agreed to be ordained in the Protestant church. He was awarded a doctorate in divinity by Cambridge and spent his last ten years as Dean of St Paul's. “For almost 60 years Donne had survived by altering,” Mr Stubbs sums up. “He had transformed himself from a closeted Catholic, as boy and youth, to a government secretary; from social outcast, after he married, to a pillar of the community, as a priest; from avant-garde poet, in his writing, to popular preacher.”

The book's main points are uncontroversial: that Donne is best understood in the context of his time and place; that although he adapted to changing circumstances, he remained true to himself; and that he was always keenly aware of death. Consequently, Mr Stubbs does not offer a new Donne, but does offer a fairly thorough account of the one we know.

The trouble is that his biography seems to have been written with both a popular and a scholarly readership in mind. This gives rise to a couple of problems. One is the oddly mixed tone. There is a frequent crunching of gears as Mr Stubbs shifts between a conversational and a more highfalutin' register. A much bigger problem is his decision to shy away from sustained discussion of Donne's poetry as poetry. Poems are quoted and paraphrased but Mr Stubbs offers next to nothing in the way of analysis. Did his publisher think this would put off ordinary readers? If so, it is more than a missed trick. There is little in these 500-plus pages to remind readers of the astonishing vibrancy and strangeness of Donne's poetic imagination.